Eh? They were always using EFL to some degree, but they eventually ditched it on much of the uppermost layers from what I recall.
There was a long series of posts from Rasta, explaining how pissed-off he was about some closed aspects, & the overall approach.
I can't recall it all in detail any more, but yeah, I get all your other points & more-or-less agree...

Oh dear....
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/...s-like-plan-b/
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/...d-in-pictures/

But do note that this is ArsTechnica...
They don't have much of a clue when it comes to niche platforms*, they typically approach them with a fairly galvanised -ve perception before they've even begun closer inspection.
At least they realise Tizen/FFOS/UbuntuTouch exists, they still refuse to do more than very rare/brief coverage of Nemo/Sailfish, been a very long-standing thing, rather odd.

*they do have more technical chops than the vast swathe of tech sites out there though


Yeah but surely there's a catch or two...
Last time we all deep-dived into this, it most certainly wasn't "open source" in the broadest sense (i.e. not just raw code dumps etc).
What's different this time round, has anything changed.